Man of the Year - Award

Friends, the day you have been waiting for is finaly here. Brickinthebox is ready to name the 2007 man of the year.

Our crack research team has spent a good part of the last month thoroughly investigating the qualifications of the nominees for 2007 brickinthebox man of the year. (Ok, there is no team it’s just me. And research consisted solely of googling pictures of each nominee for this write-up, all “facts” are things right off the top of my head, or are fabricated.)


The 1st nominee is Tom Cable

Cable is the offensive line coach for the Oakland Raiders. He came to the Raiders this past year after spending the previous couple of years in Atlanta. Along with him he brought the zone-stretch blocking scheme that turned Denver into a rushing juggernaut.

The Raiders were coming off perhaps the most pathetic offensive line performance ever seen in the modern NFL. Art Shell and Jackie Slater had the line looking more like a bunch of keystone cops than professional football players. Opposing defenses salivated at the thought of double-digit sack totals and negative rushing yards when facing the Raiders.

The Raiders did little in the off-season to supplement the talent on the line with the additions of Jeremy Newberry (old and broken) Cooper Carlisle (adequate starter) and Cornell Green (journeyman) as experienced help. The Raiders also lost their starting left tackle, Langston Walker, to free agency.

The burden of turning this line into a competent unit fell entirely on Cable’s broad shoulders. And Cable proved himself more than adequate to handle the task.

The Raiders went from 3.9 YPA (18th) to 4.1 YPA (11th) a huge improvement considering the time it takes to learn the new system and the fact that the Raiders counted on Justin Fargas to carry the load at running back for most of the year.

Even more impressive was the improvement in Pass blocking; the Raiders went from allowing a sack once every 6.7 pass attempts to once every 11 attempts. An improvement of almost 2 less sacks per game.

Sure some of this success can be attributed to implementing an NFL offensive scheme rather than the Pop Warner offense seen last year. But for providing the blocking that made this improvement possible, Tom Cable is a deserving candidate for brickinthebox man of the year.

Our 2nd nominee is Clint Bowyer.

Bowyer came out of nowhere in 2007 to challenge for the Nextel cup. Riding a consistent, but not spectacular year to a 3rd place finish.

Bowyer was viewed as sort of a fluke as the chase for the cup commenced with 10 races left in the season. 9th in the standing, Bowyer had not notched a win all year and only had 1 pole on the year.

Things changed as the pressure ramped up with the chase. Bowyer won both the pole and the race in New Hampshire to kick off the chase, and never looked back. Only a bullshit call to end the race in Dover kept him from being a factor in the last 3 weeks for the overall title. Bowyer announced his presence on the circuit as a contender with authority to close out the 2007 season.

Through in that Bowyer drives the Jack Daniels car, wears silver and black and since he is a good southern boy most likely packs his lip full of Skoal and there are few better individuals to represent brickinthebox as the 2007 man of the year.

The final nominee for 2007 brickinthebox man of the year is King Leonidas from the movie 300.

The actual King Leonidas may have actually lived 2500 years ago, and his exploits came nowhere near those shown in the movie 300, but he served as the inspiration for a cinematic masterpiece.

The movie was essential a 2-hour battle scene, with a little political intrigue thrown in to, who the fuck knows why it was thrown in, studio execs are stupid.

Leonidas banged the incredibly hot Lena Headey with the cameras running for the moviegoers benefit. He beat the shit out of the Persians. Aw, whom am I kidding, he kicked ass, but his nomination is just a thinly veiled excuse to post a picture of Headey in the man of the year column.

Go see the movie if you want to see her tits, this is not a porn site… THIS IS BRICKINTHEBOX.

After careful deliberation, brickinthebox is proud to announce that…

Tom Cable is the 2007 brickinthebox Man of the Year.

Bowyer came in a close 2nd, but he let Gordon place ahead of him in the final standings. Had he wrecked that prick intentionally at least once he would have been a shoe-in.

Leonidas came in 3rd, but what do you want from a movie character.

Tom, you can look forward to a tastefully done certificate of merit in the mail, when I get to it.

Man of the Year - the nominees

While dozing in and out of conciseness while being driven to work this morning, I heard Don King announce his man of the year on the Howard Stern Show. Now as I said, I was half asleep, so I turned to the driver and said, “Did Don King just announce his man of the year?” Once he assured me that Don King had in fact named some General from the Iraq war (Look I know his name, I’m just too lazy to look up the spelling) as his man of the year, I knew I needed to do something.

I needed to name the inaugural brickinthebox man of the year.

For this award to have any meaning, I must put the maximum effort into selecting the right individual, but where to start, I mean I should really start doing some work by lunch today, so that only leaves me 3 ½ hours to pull this off.

Step 1 – Select potential nominees

Face it, this blog hasn’t been around that long, just since October, so I’m not going to get a good feel for the year by looking through the archives for nominees. But that’s where we will start:

Tom Brady seemed to get mentioned a lot, so did Stuart Scott, Tom Cable would be a selection only Raider Fans could appreciate, as would Lane Kiffen, Peyton Manning won a Super Bowl and made at least 5,000 commercials, and I guess Bill Simmons got a lot of run around here.

Not much to choose from there, for this websites purposes, we are going to take Tom Cable from that pool, as he installed a system that actually had the Raiders look competent in the run game.

So we have our 1st nominee, where do we find the next one. Well what do I remember from the year.

Mike Vick did something stupid, so did Pac-Man Jones, Bush was a disappointment (both at running the country and the football), Clint Bowyer drove real fast in circles while drinking Jack, some little faggot shot some innocent people at VT, K-Fed actually won a custody battle, read that again, K-Fed is a better parent in the eyes of the court.

So from this group I’m selecting Clint Bowyer as the nominee, K-Fed almost got the nod, but I could give two shits about celebrity gossip and love Jack Daniels. The other guys are all asshats.

We still need a 3rd nominee, and we are almost a ½ hour into the process, we’d be further along, but the phone is ringing off the hook today, god damn it, why do I actually have to do work to get paid. I guess we’ll go to CNN’s year in review page and see what sticks out to me.

Some crazy astronaut drove half-way across the country in a diaper, Barry Bonds pissed of baseball purists, Larry Craig tapped his foot, Sean Taylor died.

That was a dead end, nobody there makes the grade for this prestigious award, Sean Taylor came the closest, but just doesn’t feel right for this site.

So I’m just going to go with my favorite piece of entertainment from the year. The movie 300 was great, so our final nominee is King Leonidas.

There you have it, BrickintheBox’s 3 nominees for Man of the Year are:

Tom Cable

Clint Bowyer

And

King Leonidas

The phone won’t stop ringing, so we will return to this important task later in the day.